PowerPoint for Windows

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With its wide breadth of slideshow tools, Microsoft's PowerPoint 2018 for Windows puts professional-grade presentation tools at your fingertips.

Pros

Deep collection of slideshow and presentation tools: With PowerPoint for Windows, you can do all the other things the other presentation apps can do. Build PowerPoint slides; add, rearrange, and delete slides for a deck; work with text; add tables, charts, and shapes; insert images; print your slides, slide notes, and handouts; and create transitions between slides. But PowerPoint takes everything a step further, giving you fine control over placing and moving objects, for example, or letting you add and play audio across slides. And PowerPoint's presenter view stands out, doing a solid job of keeping you oriented during a presentation by displaying on a second screen your speaker notes, the next slide, and your relative location in your slide deck.

Themes and templates: Microsoft has more than 100 themes you can use to start building your slide layouts. Theme styles run from professional to artful, and the more highly designed ones come with instructions for how to use a theme's more interesting features in your presentations. You can also search by type, including sales proposal, business strategy, business marketing, staff training, school report, project status, medical poster, and grant proposal.

Comes with Office 365: Microsoft PowerPoint fills the presentation-software spot in the Office collection of productivity tools. If you want PowerPoint and the rest of the Office suite, for $69.99 a year, you can subscribe to the Office 365 Personal edition, which includes the Excel spreadsheet; the Word text editor; the OneNote note-taking app; the Outlook email app; the OneDrive cloud storage service; and the Skype voice- and video-calling app.

The Office 365 Home edition, costs $99 a year and includes the same collection of Office apps. You can share your subscription with four other users beside yourself.

If you'd rather buy, not subscribe, for $149.99, you can own the Office Home and Student 2016 for PC edition, which comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

And if all you want is PowerPoint: You can get the most recent version of Microsoft's presentation program -- PowerPoint 2016 -- separately for $129.99. The individual slideshow software includes bug fixes and other improvements but doesn't include an upgrade to the next major edition of the PowerPoint. The standalone version also doesn't include access to OneDrive services and Skype perks.

Living in the cloud: If you subscribe to the Office 365 suite, you can take advantage of Microsoft's OneDrive service to store, edit, and automatically update your PowerPoint files from a browser and any Mac, PC, and mobile device.

Real-time collaboration: You can share your PowerPoint files from your Windows PC or through PowerPoint Online, and then collaborate in real time with colleagues with PowerPoint online via OneDrive. Comments in a PowerPoint file are threaded, so you can carry on a conversation.

Also, mobile, MacOS, and web versions: In addition to the PC edition, Microsoft has PowerPoint apps for Mac, Android, iPhone, and the web via a browser.

See: For a solid and free choice, try Google Docs.

Cons

Pricey: If your business has settled on the Microsoft Office software or you are looking for the presentation horsepower PowerPoint offers, the price isn't much of an issue. But if you are looking for a presentation app that covers the basics but doesn't cost much, you may want to check out something like Google Sheets to good-looking presentations.

Bottom Line

You can either get PowerPoint with Microsoft Office 365 for Windows or as a standalone app, but either way, Microsoft Office PowerPoint slide shows software has all the slideshow tools you need to wow them with your PowerPoint presentations.

See also

Microsoft to give Office 365, Office.com apps a makeover (from ZDNet)

Three tips for using Excel's conditional formatting more efficiently (from TechRepublic)

10+ things you should know before buying Office 365 (from TechRepublic)